Higgs Centre School of Theoretical Physics 2015

The first edition of the Higgs Centre School of Theoretical Physics will take place in May 25-30 at the Higgs Centre, James Clerk Maxwell Building, Edinburgh. The scientific programme starts at 14:00 on Monday, May 25th, and ends at 13:00 on Saturday, May 30th. The School comprises two in-depth lecture series, each involving five 2-hours lectures delivered on the blackboard, and a similar number of tutorials. For this year's School we are delighted to have:

Maurizio Piai (Swansea) "The Standard Model at the Energy Frontier and Beyond"

We will critically review and discuss several non-trivial field-theory properties of the Standard Model, with reference to their implications for model building and for direct and indirect searches for new physics. Topics we will cover include: the Coleman-Weinberg effective potential, the concepts of fine-tuning and naturalness, perturbative unitarity in WW scattering, precision electroweak physics and the electroweak chiral Lagrangian, flavor-changing neutral currents and the GIM mechanism, breaking of scale invariance and elements of Higgs (particle) physics at the LHC.

Lectures: Monday through Friday, 14:00-16:00; Tutorials: 16:30-18:00

Claude Duhr (CERN) "Mathematical aspects of scattering amplitudes and precision computations for the LHC"

We will review various cutting-edge techniques for the computation of multi-loop Feynman integrals inspired by modern algebraic geometry and number theory. We will mainly focus on differential equations satisfied by Feynman integrals, and the algebraic and combinatorial properties of the functions that are needed to solve these differential equations. We will illustrate these concepts with explicit results for multi-loop scattering amplitudes an integrals in QCD and the N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory.

Lectures: Tuesday through Saturday 9:00-11:00; Tutorials: 11:30-13:00

The School's main target audience is PhD students working in Theoretical Particle Physics, in their second year on. Postdoctoral researches are also encouraged to participate. The School is funded by the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics (Edinburgh U.) and by the institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (Durham U.). We charge no registration fees and are providing dinner on the evening of Friday 29th May at the Amber Restaurant, part of The Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre.

For any question concerning the School please contact the Higgs Centre secretary Lyndsey Miller at admin-general@ph.ed.ac.uk